In recent years, fast development of the information and photoelectric technologies leads to increasingly high requirements for the manufacture of ceramic substrate, semiconductor wafer, optical crystal, decoration or construction stone. The manufacture of semiconductor wafer, in particular, requires ultra-smooth and ultra-flat surface, and the avoidance of residual stress and damage to the surface and subsurface.
The ultraprecise polishing methods for the above-described materials mainly include loose abrasive polishing, fixed abrasive polishing and non-traditional machining methods. During the loose abrasive polishing, the abrasive particles are arranged randomly and the track is uncontrolled. The abrasive particles form a three-body movement, resulting in low manufacturing efficiency. Aggregation may easily happen when the abrasive particles are small in size, which leads to workpiece surface damage and thus influencing the manufacturing quality. Corrosive grinding fluid and loose abrasive not only are wasteful, but also pollute the environment. Since the disk used in fixed abrasive polishing is rigid, and the recondition is complex during the polishing process, the conditions during manufacturing process must be strictly controlled to avoid damage easily caused to the workpiece. In addition, above mentioned aggregation problem also exists. Better surface quality may be obtained by other novel non-traditional manufacturing methods, however, the requirement for equipment is also high, and highly efficient and fast manufacturing of large workpieces is also difficult to be implemented. Therefore, these novel non-traditional manufacturing methods can hardly be applied in industry-wide mass manufacturing.
To solve the above-described problems, semi-fixed polishing means, such as ice disk, resin polishing plate, hydrophilic polishing film, have been developed by domestic and international researchers, which solve the dispersion issue of small particle abrasive to a certain degree. However, the holding force of the bond to the abrasive is relatively low and the abrasive is mostly loose during processing. Besides, the waste is quite trouble to treat post-processing as the polymer is rather difficult to be degraded.